the Yorkshire Tourist Board has left Keighley off the map.

In the tourist board's Coach Tours Guide to Yorkshire the town is left completely off a big map of Yorkshire with local attractions receiving only a brief mention.

And to compound the insult, in the Yorkshire Group Organiser Travel Trade Directory for 1999-2000 Keighley appears on a map of Yorkshire spelled without a second 'e' - to read 'Keighly'.

On the Coach Tours Guide page - headed 'You probably think you know Yorkshire well?' - Keighley is not even mentioned. The map has the M62 motorway (which runs from Liverpool to Hull) wrongly running through Ilkley and ending miles before it reaches Hull. The same map mis-spells the town of Beverley as 'Beverly'.

Now members of the Keighley and Haworth Tourism Management Group have voiced their anger at the standards of the brochures produced by the Yorkshire Tourist Board.

They are also furious at the way in which Keighley - the mis-spelled version - has been shrunk in proportion to Haworth on the map. While Keighley appears in small normal type, Haworth is printed in larger letters and bolder type.

Today we join in the furore, urging readers to swamp the Yorkshire Tourist Board with protests.

Chairman of Keighley and Haworth Tourism Management Group Jackie Cope says: "It is disappointing that in spite of our efforts over quite a number of years and having fairly major tourist attractions, we still don't seem to be on the map. I think we need closer cooperation between Keighley and Haworth Tourism Management Group, Bront Country Tourism and the Yorkshire Tourist Board."

Members of the tourism group have also lambasted the standard of editorial in the coach tour guide, which briefly mentions Haworth's Bront Parsonage Museum and the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway.

Railway chairman Graham Mitchell says: "All of the local attractions are paying fairly substantial amounts on advertising with the Yorkshire Tourist Board and it is very disappointing to see this kind of gobbledegook."

Bront Country Tourism manager Debbie Hopkinson - who is responsible for the promotion of tourist attractions in Keighley and surrounding areas - has vowed to take up the issue with the Yorkshire Tourist Board. She says: "It is disappointing that Keighley doesn't appear on the map and that the standard of the editorial is not particularly high. We would also like to know why the editorial was not checked before the brochure was printed."

Tourist Board Communications Manager Jo Pickering says: "With regard to the Coach Tours UK brochure, we only sponsor part of that publication but it is very unfortunate that Keighley is not on the map.

"For the Yorkshire Group Organ-isers' Travel Trade Directory we actually brought in the map from another company, but we are concerned that it has been spelt incorrectly and we will be doing everything to ensure this doesn't happen again. There has been no change in the map for some years but we are pleased to be told about this so we can do something about it."

The tourist board brought in the map from Estate Publications which is based in Tenterden, Kent.

Tourist chiefs united, page 11

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.